“we need haters to help us grow … they are in your life for a reason”

By alice | February 18, 2009

uma-thurman-kill-bill

Uma Thurman deals with haters in her own way

This is from a great essay by Danny Choo on BoingBoing (read it all):

Society has all walks of people and we would never be able to successfully get through life without experiencing haters and learning how to deal with them. Remember that we need haters to help us grow and that they are in your life for a reason. You must work out what that reason is and learn how to deal with them. By understanding that its most probably because they are jealous, scared or need attention will help you define how to deal with them.

What you must not do is spend large amounts of time worrying or thinking about the people who hate you. This is your life and not theirs. You should not waste your precious life on people who hate you and focus on your beautiful life that you have ahead of you.

additional thoughts:
1. If haters are here to give you information of some kind, that’s about providence or synchronicity or whatever, not about them knowing you and giving you what you need. You don’t have any kind of relationship with them, and they’re not actually trying to help you.
2. The good is an accidental side-effect. They just happen to be there, doing their thing, which happens to be potentially useful to you in the universal scheme of things, hopefully.
3. Definitely get out of the way and end the effect they are having on you if you possibly can.
4. Do you believe in revenge? I rather like the idea, including where God is the avenger. Religiously, it’s complicated, with different groups spanning the whole range from total universal forgiveness to hell carnage to karmic just desserts. Anyway, just saying: learning from your hater doesn’t mean they won’t get comeuppance anyway…
5. The best thing I ever did to a hater was take a deep breath and thank them for letting me know their evidently heartfelt opinions. This completely took the wind out of their sails and I never heard anything hateful from them again. If only it was always that easy.
6. It’s a very sad but very true fact that some of the worst haters are ex-friends/family/close people. As you grow up and learn to be a better person, there will always be those who just can’t stand you changing because (a) they do not want to adapt themselves enough to acceptance of what you are doing, and (b) they still want you doing the older stuff you used to do instead. The only thing you can do here is let go. It’s time to learn how to put your chosen values above mere people-pleasing, by knowing what you believe in and being prepared to stand up for it (nb. which must include the importance of your own life-path and learning in some kind of moral/ spiritual context).
7. Haters are opportunists who seek out anyone who looks scared or feeble in any way. To some extent, being really clear and confident about not giving the time of day to people who waste yours can reduce how many you attract.

And that’s enough pontificating from me for now.

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2 Comments »

2 Responses to ““we need haters to help us grow … they are in your life for a reason””

rossi Says:
March 3rd, 2009 at 6:33 pm

yeah i spent a lot of energy hating gwbush
total waste of my spirit
then i realized that it took him screwing up the country
so badly for folks to get over their racism
and party-ism
and vote in obama
so a silver lining
if obama manages to save this country
from this terrible strife
at least we will know that him being in office
was one good thing
from hating gwbush

Theocritus Says:
March 5th, 2009 at 1:11 am

There is I think another class of haters–ideological ones. Only a third (a THIRD) of British Muslims think it incumbent on them to kill Jews. Jews that they don’t know. It is a vanity of overeducated people to think that these people can be reasoned with. It seems rather self-important to think that people like this are in your life for a reason. They’re just there, hating you for you being who you are and the lesson that you take from them is self-defense, not talking.

I’ve also noticed another category of people who hate one. People who have to cobble together reasons for their actions. I knew a woman, L., who married a good friend, whom she instantly started screwing around on. His mother, M.K., is one of the truly gentle and kind people on earth, and he, A., is very good too. To keep from hating herself, L. had to manufacture reasons that M.K. and A. were evil and they most assuredly are not. The more she screwed around, the more virulent her hatred was. It was to salvage her amour propre, for had she looked in the mirror in full conscience of her actions, she would have won the gold medal for denial or she would have had to change, and she was too self-centered for that.

—–

rossi, pardon, but that’s just silly.